Noting the Tunes of Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballads: The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

This essay focuses on the ways a digital archive of printed, pre-1701 English broadside ballads facilitates and complicates the orality that folklorists have traditionally seen in opposition to print. The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) recaptures the multi-media nature of early broadside ballads—as text, art, and song—providing recordings of all extant tunes for the printed ballads and, in doing so, capturing the ease and difficulties of matching text to tune